Sam Neill, the amiable and adventurous leading man who emerged from New Zealand to make his mark in such films as Jurassic Park, The Piano, Dead Calm, In the Mouth of Madness and so much more, has died. He was 78.
The news was shared in a post on Neill’s official Instagram account.
“It is with immense sadness that the whānau of Sam Neill share the news of his passing on Monday 13th July, in Sydney Australia,” the post read. “Sam was surrounded by family and passed with the dignity that has characterised his whole life. The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free. They would like to express their deepest gratitude to the staff at St Vincent’s Private Hospital for their incredible care. More details will be shared later, but for now, on behalf of the family, we ask that you respect their privacy as they navigate this immeasurable loss.”
Neill revealed in March 2023 that he had been diagnosed with angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma a year earlier.
“I’m not in any way frightened of dying. That doesn’t worry me. It’s never worried me from the beginning,” he told the TV news magazine Australian Story in October 2023. “But I would be annoyed, because there are things I still want to do.”
Early in his career, the boundary-breaking Neill starred in Sleeping Dogs (1977), one of the first New Zealand films to play internationally; in the Australian period drama My Brilliant Career (1979), opposite Judy Davis; and as Damien in the third Omen film, The Final Conflict (1981), filmed in the U.K.
Neill also played a Russian officer in John McTiernan’s The Hunt for Red October (1990); a captain of a doomed spaceship in Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon (1997); the father of Scarlett Johansson’s character in Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998); and the patriarch of a family with a robot (Robin Williams) in Chris Columbus’ Bicentennial Man (1999).
On television, he portrayed a real-life spy on the 1983 ITV series Reilly: Ace of Spies; the King Arthur magician Merlin in Hallmark miniseries that aired in 1998 and 2006; Cardinal Thomas Wolsey on Showtime’s The Tudors in 2007; the corrupt police inspector Chester Campbell on the BBC’s Peaky Blinders in 2013-14; and a husband whose wife goes missing in Peacock’s Apples Never Fall in 2024.
After starring alongside Nicole Kidman and Billy Zane in the psychological thriller Dead Calm (1989), directed by Australian Phillip Noyce, Neill had quite the year in 1993 with his turns as the cynical paleontologist Alan Grant in Steven Spielberg‘s Jurassic Park and as the cold, cruel frontiersman Alisdair Stewart in The Piano, directed by New Zealander Jane Campion.
And in John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (1994) — one of his many horror films — Neill played the insurance man John Trent, whose investigation leads him into an insane asylum.
The versatile Neill portrayed heroes and villains with equal aplomb, sparkled in art house and tentpoles alike and had a knack for exploring the shades of gray in his characters. “I’d like to think I’m able to suggest ambiguities and complexities in the people I play, because I think all of us have hidden aspects or contradictory qualities,” he once said.
Nigel John Dermot Neill was born on Sept. 14, 1947, on the kitchen table in the family home in Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, where his father, Dermot, a third-generation New Zealander, was stationed with the Royal Irish Fusiliers as a member of the British Army. His mother, Priscilla, was English.
They moved in 1955 to New Zealand, where his family had a wine and spirits merchant business, and he attended boarding school at Medbury School and Christ’s College in Christchurch. He started calling himself Sam — he liked Westerns, and “Western people were called things like Sam,” he wrote in his 2023 memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This? — and had a stuttering problem.
He got interested in acting while attending the University of Canterbury, then earned a degree in English literature at Victoria University. After graduation, Neill toured for a year doing Shakespeare with the Players’ Drama Quartet and spent six years as a director of shorts and documentaries with the New Zealand National Film Unit.
“The informal agreement there was that you’d make one film for the post office or the railways or the banana company and you’d make one for yourself,” he said in a 2009 interview. “I wanted to make a film about skiing — I love skiing — but I had to dress it up and say that it would be really good for tourism.”
Neill also did a bit of acting, and after he was spotted playing a priest in the short film Ashes (1975), he was cast in the lead as a man on the run from a totalitarian government in Sleeping Dogs (1977), directed by Roger Donaldson. The thriller, the first color film made in New Zealand, helped kickstart the country’s “cinema of unease” movement.
He said he fell in love with Australia while he was portraying Davis’ complicated love interest in Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979), which screened in competition in Cannes and made him realize that he could make a living doing what he loved to do. Around this time, he also recurred as Ben Dawson on the Nine Network period soap opera The Sullivans.
Recommended by James Mason, Neill got to play Damien — the antichrist is now a grown-up U.S. ambassador — in The Final Conflict. Two years later, he was the dashing Russian adventurer turned British secret agent Sidney Reilly on Reilly: Ace of Spies, and he earned a Golden Globe nomination for that.
He would become a favorite in Sweden after starring as the villain Brian de Bois-Guilbert on a 1982 TV adaptation of Ivanhoe that airs on New Year’s Day every year in the country, then starred alongside Meryl Streep for Aussie director Fred Schepisi in Plenty (1985) and Evil Angels (1988), the latter about one of the most controversial legal cases in Australian history.
Neill auditioned for James Bond in The Living Daylights (1987) but said he really didn’t want the part, he explained in a 2021 interview.
“I felt so awkward all that day when we made that thing. It went on and on and on,” he said. “I’m so relieved they offered it to someone else. You really don’t want to be the Bond that no one likes. That’s a fate worse than death.” (Timothy Dalton would play 007 for the first time in that film.)
Neill described Dr. Grant in a 2001 interview as a man who has “tremendous ambivalence. He knows Jurassic Park is a horrible place to be and knows there’s nothing more dangerous than a dinosaur that is not behind bars. But because he lives and breathes dinosaurs, he finds them completely compelling.”
He would return as Grant in Joe Johnston’s Jurassic World III (2001) and Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World Dominion (2022).
He wrote in his memoir that The Piano, winner of the Palme d’Or and three Oscars, was a “lonely” job because Holly Hunter, who portrayed Ada, the wife his character abuses, “was of necessity remote” (not surprising since Alisdair cuts off her finger in the movie). “Happily,” he added, “Jane is a very caring director for her cast and was always there to hug me when I was at my lowest.”
Neill also did lots of work (2002’s Dirty Deeds, 2008’s Dean Spanley, TV’s Old School, etc.) alongside his “brother from another mother,” Aussie actor Bryan Brown.
His film résumé also included Possession (1981), Death in Brunswick (1990), Carpenter’s Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), Country Life (1994), Restoration (1995), Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997), The Dish (2000), The Zookeeper (2001), Perfect Strangers (2003), Skin (2008), Daybreakers (2009), The Hunter (2011), Taika Waititi‘s Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) and, as a stage actor playing Odin, Thor Ragnarok (2017) and Thor: Love and Thunder (2022).
In 1983, Neill bought some acreage in central Otago in New Zealand — this was “always the land of my dreams; this was where we came for holidays when I was a kid,” he said in 2020 — and launched his Two Paddocks vineyard.
“I don’t expect people to take me seriously, but I’m determined that they respect my wine,” he told the London Times in 2014. “A few weeks ago it won a trophy and two gold medals in London. I call that the ‘up yours’ factor.”
He also was a comforting, entertaining presence during the pandemic, when he posted videos of him singing and playing the ukulele on Twitter.
Survivors include his children, Andrew, Tim and Elena, and six grandchildren.
After a long relationship with New Zealand actress Lisa Harrow (they met on The Final Conflict), he was married to Japanese makeup artist Noriko Watanabe (they met on Dead Calm) from 1989 until their 2017 divorce. More recently, he dated Laura Tingle, a political journalist for Australia’s ABC network.
In 2022, a writer for the Sydney Morning Telegraph noted that Neill is the least “celebrity” celebrity there is.
“I do hope I’m not a celebrity because … I think it’s two different jobs,” he said. “You can be an actor — hopefully a very good actor — but it’s another job to be a celebrity, and that’s one you can sign up for or not. And I never signed up for that. I’ve avoided that like the plague.
“The winemaking thing is absolutely half my life and has been immensely rewarding, and it’s very different from everything else that I do. I’m sort of … half-farmer, half-thespian, if you like.”
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